Comment by wildzzz
1 day ago
With the price of SBCs nowadays, you'll probably save some money just buying an ip camera.
In 2018, I had a project where I needed to capture live video of some test equipment that was in an area off limits to humans. I could get measurements remotely but just not fast enough to stop the test if something went wrong. We also had no idea what to expect if something went wrong so there was no way to setup a trigger for a screengrab. We had zero funds for buying anything, PM told me to beg, borrow, or steal what I needed. I got a couple of old laptops and webcams from IT and built my own version of this using a slick ffmpeg one-liner to record locally and stream to another laptop outside the off limits area. I did have to buy a USB 3.0 ExpressCard, which I kept, because turns out you can't run multiple webcams through the single USB hub every port branched off from (even the docking station ports). It worked great.
> With the price of SBCs nowadays, you'll probably save some money just buying an ip camera.
The post you replied to very specifically mentioned using an IP camera. Unless you are paying “proper” money per camera, these days most of them are limited out-of-the-box in ways that are intended to drive you to paying a subscription service to have the recordings stored and processed (and presumably used for AI training whether you agree or not) on someone else's server.
The point of this, and other similar projects, is to host that target server yourself to maintain control and privacy. Where it says “such as […] a USB webcam” I assume it is using the same components and libraries that other options do and so will support common IP camera outputs easily too (assuming your camera doesn't protect its feed, or protects it badly, or you can flash it with alternate firmware that doesn't try to lock you in that way), and where it says “such as a spare Linux board …” spare here implies the target audience is people who are likely to have a spare board/box (or resource spare on their home-lab to host an extra container/VM) available so don't need to buy one at current prices.
> these days most of them are limited out-of-the-box in ways that are intended to drive you to paying a subscription service
This is why open protocols like RTSP are needed. A camera should never be allowed to communicate directly over the Internet.
Many inexpensive cameras aimed at the consumer market have taken to "blocking" the open standards that they otherwise support. Not very well, stupid schemes like encryption the stream with a symmetric key that can be read off the device, but well enough to inconvenience the average home user such that they decide to go the convenience route and send the data to the cloud for AI training and Chinese/US/other government surveillance instead.
There are usually ways to get access to the standard protocols, unofficial firmwares for cameras by Yi¹ for instance, but many won't faf around like that even if they might try setup local recording (trying local software isn't going to break anything, an issue flashing a device could brick it so feels like a bigger step).
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[1] I used to have a couple of there cameras that did local recording to SD-card, to keep an eye on the cats remotely, though access to thar mysteriously stopped working and support just suggested using subscribing to cloud recording instead… Those cameras were dirt cheap though and after a little research I decided working out the right alt firmware for the units I had and using it, would be more faf than just buying new cameras that were less inconvenient and giving those away with appropriate "the only reliable way to use this device is to send you data overseas" warnings.